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What you see may be what you get, but it's not necessarily what everyone else gets. I was reminded of this when I bought a gaming monitor. I'd originally intended to get a 4K monitor of some kind, but I decided to go for speed over size. The one I did get can render my games at a brisk 144hz, and my games have never looked better. Well, they looked good after I finally got my color calibration worked out. It took a while, as I was out of practice, but after finding my monitor's ICC profile and eyeballing the calibration...

Nobody can do it all, no matter how broad your skill set is, it's likely that at some point you're going to take on a project where you need to bring in some help — somebody with the skills you lack. In this situation you can either pay to hire somebody with those skills, or, you can find somebody willing to do a skill-swap. For those of you unfamiliar with the concept of skill swapping, it's based on the premise that you trade skills rather cash. For example, if I need somebody to help me with web development,...

There are plenty of applications, resources or services out there that can help make your life as a web designer easier. I've used many different ones over the years, and there are some I keep coming back to. This is a personal list, and I would love to hear about any alternatives that you've found useful too! Task Management ... One of the most important things in your life (both personal and professional) is your time. There is a finite amount of it and keeping track of what you have to do and by when is vital....

The query string in the DOM has always been a bit awkward, why there isn't a standard method of parsing it is beyond me. The normal route most people follow is to convert it in to a simple array of Key/Value pairs. This allows you to then access the values of the query string using the array accessor syntax. //domain.com/index.html?key=value var value = querystring_array['key']; Still a little clumsy isn't it? Wouldn't it be great to be able to just retrieve the value from a normal JavaScript/JSON object?...

I've used the Google Maps API a few times over the last while and one thing that I've never really touched on is it's fantastic customization options. You can pretty much style or customize everything. In this quick post I'll show you how to change the default marker (or pin) to something else. This is handy if you want to display your company logo or some other icon on the map. I'll also detail the other configurable options that you can change in the google.maps.Marker class. Getting Started ... We saw earlier...

In this weeks tutorial we'll be creating a jQuery plugin that serves as an introduction to the HTML5 Geo-location API to request your current location. Once we have the location, we will then draw a route from there to Dublin, Ireland (or wherever you tell it to) using the Google Maps API. This could be used in a HTML5 web application or on a site to tell your customers how to get to you. Getting Started ... First of all we'll need to create our jQuery plugin wrapper. The $.extend function will allow us to provide...

Everyone knows the most popular WordPress plug-ins, but there are plenty of others out there that don't get the same level of press and are just as useful. Outside of the obvious ones, here's my alternate list of plug-ins that you should be using. Some of these do appear in the popular lists, but in general they're not near the first few pages. Advanced Excerpt ... This is quite an old plug-in, but it still works perfectly. It allows you easily customize the excerpt for posts. You can set the maximum number...

For the last few years I've run my own Subversion (SVN) server on either a spare box and more recently with a paid for server. This was mainly because my work was private and I was familiar with SVN, and I found that the TortoiseSVN client was excellent and easy to use. My needs have changed and evolved over the years, particularly in the last few months since I started these tutorials. So I have decided to start moving new projects and some of my tutorials to GitHub. I've been watching GitHub progress over the...

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Founded in 2011, we focus on the latest trends, tutorials, opinion articles as well as tips and tricks to empower our readers to become better web developers.